


Don't Blame Me (Love Made Me Crazy)

by afterandalasia



Series: repugaytion: A Descendants Femslash Songfic Series [1]
Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 17th Century, Captivity, F/F, Happy Ending, Inspired by Julie d’Aubigny, Nunneries, Nuns, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rescue, Reunions, Running Away, Song: Don't Blame Me (Taylor Swift)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-21 04:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14908238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: Mal was a fire, and Evie walked willingly into the flames.Then Grimhilde found out.Now Evie plans her escape from the convent into which she has been forced, knowing that Mal is waiting, and is coming to find her in return. She will not be cowed, and she will not be broken.





	Don't Blame Me (Love Made Me Crazy)

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been listening to _reputation_ and got the insane idea to try to do a whole series of Descendants femslash stories based on it. Mostly Malvie. This is the first one that came together properly.
> 
> [Don't Blame Me](https://open.spotify.com/track/0OnfGJsCc1m9utfUYqid6O) on Spotify
> 
>  
> 
> _Don't blame me, love made me crazy,_  
>  If it doesn't, you ain't doing it right.  
> Oh, Lord save me.

There had been no probation.

Evie knew that there should have been. She did not know how much of her dowry her mother had paid to the convent, how much money had been given to be sure that Evie would never leave again. But Grimhilde had decided: Evie would not leave, and so there was no need for a probation.

The stone was painful on her knees, the water so cold that she could only half-feel her fingers. Her shoulders ached from being on her hands and knees to scrub the stone floor of the misericord. The skin of her knuckles had cracked with the hours that she had spent washing with the harsh lye soap, and all that she could do for it was brush away the droplets of blood that swirled into the water.

She had screamed, until her throat had been too painful to scream. She had beaten at the door of her cell until her hands had been too bruised to beat. She had pled with the Abbess until her mouth was too dry to plead.

They had not relented.

 

 

_“You can call me Mal,” the woman said. She wore breeches like a man and scandal like a cape. Her hair was up in a ghirlanda wound with purple cloth, and she had a shining sword in her hand._

_For a moment, Evie could not find her tongue, then she clenched her fist and raised her chin. “You are in our gardens uninvited,” she said, sternly. “I will call for the guards.”_

_“Relax,” Mal drawled. She raised her sword, and Evie’s heart seemed to skip a beat, but then simply swung it round and, with the very tip, cut through the stalk of one of the apples on the tree beside them._

_Evie started, knowing what her mother would think if one of the apples fell to the ground, but quick as a flash the apple was in Mal’s hand._

_“Pretty legendary, these.” Mal spun the apple in her hand. “And I can never resist a dare.”_

_She winked. Evie felt herself flush._

_“You broke into my mother’s home for a_ dare _?”_

_“And I’ll be gone just as quick, don’t you worry. Take care, princess.”_

_She tucked the apple into her veste, sheathed her sword, and before Evie could talk again had darted away among the green lanes of the gardens._

_A strange event, perhaps. But Evie was sure that she would never see this Mal again; it would not matter._

_She had been so sure that it would not matter._

 

 

 _Prime_ would be soon. It would be no refuge, not when she would need to kneel before the cross and feel the eyes of the nuns upon her, watching her, waiting for her to slip up. She knew that if she tried to run, she would be caught. That if she tried to protest, she would be returned to her cell to be left without sunlight or food until she relented.

She knew that she would find a way out, sooner or later. But she did not yet know what that way would be.

 

 

_The next time that she saw Mal again, there were no breeches, no swords, Mal wore a stunning lilac gown and had amethysts in her hair, and looked highly unimpressed at the singer that Evie’s mother was hosting._

_Evie glimpsed her across the room, lost sight of her, and the next that she knew Mal was at her elbow and leaning in to murmur in her ear._

_“I’d rather talk to you than listen to him.”_

_A shiver ran down Evie’s spine at the soft feeling of Mal’s breath on her cheek, the brush of fingers across the back of her wrist._

_She should have said no. She had no reason to trust this stranger with an assumed name, who made so bold as to touch her wrist and talk so sweetly to her._

_Instead, she slipped from the room, to meet her on a quiet balcony._

_Before the night was over, she was doomed._

She had been too contrary to earn food for breakfast. At least the hunger she could handle; her mother had turned her towards hunger often enough, after all.

They returned her to scrubbing at the stones. It gave her nothing to do but think, plot, _begrudge_.

She would find her way out. Even with her knuckles bleeding and her stomach knotting, she would find her way out.

 

 

_“Mal is so much catchier than Magdalena. But it has the same spirit.” Mal’s eyes glittered._

_The sinner-saint. Evie caught her breath, and told herself that she was not captivated by the curve of Mal’s lips. “Not here to steal, this time?” she said._

_Mal laughed, low and sensual, and brushed her hand against Evie’s arm seemingly without noticing._

_Evie could notice nothing but the touch of skin on hers. Not so soft; the callouses of swordplay were marked on Mal’s hands, and Evie could feel them intimately._

_“I had told Jay I would get that damn apple. He bettered it days later, but it was worth it to see the look on his face.”_

_“Perhaps you should have asked,” Evie said, feeling her voice drop away to little more than a whisper._

_Mal’s eyes met hers, and they were like marsh-lights by the soft glow of the moon. “And what else could I ask for?”_

_There was a moment when Evie almost thought that she might answer_ anything _, the yearning in her chest already growing even if she would not notice it for many months more. “Well,” she said, though. “You could ask my name, for a start.”_

_“Why, when I could simply call you Bellissima?”_

She held to her memories of Mal as, day after day, they forced her to scrub, to sweep, to dig in the fields. She knew that even the other young nuns looked askance at her, heard from whispers that they had been told not to speak to her.

They would not break her. She curled her hands into fists even if it split the skin on her knuckles again. It didn’t matter that they made her empty their chamberpots or scrub their clothes, it did not matter that they made her work thrice as hard as those who had entered willingly.

They would not break her.

 

 

_The second time that Mal trespassed into their gardens, it was to speak to her. Evie snuck out of her room in the cover of darkness, and they talked for hours beneath the stars. Mal was intense, and unafraid, and just a little dangerous; she duelled in back streets and anonymously published scathing tracts against the Medicis. Sometimes she wore women’s garb, but more often men’s, the easier to climb over the walls that hemmed Evie in._

_The only time that Evie heard a flicker of hesitation in her voice was when she said that one of her duels had been with a young nobleman who had objected to Mal’s affections for his sister._

_Evie’s breath caught in her throat. She had heard of such things, in her mother’s rantings on licentiousness. Grimhilde had doubtless never thought that such stray words would linger so long and so intensely._

_Words that meant there were others in the world who looked at women the way that Evie did._

_“Did the sister herself object?” she managed, though her throat was dry._

_It brought the smile back to Mal’s lips. “Believe me, she did not.”_

She could handle a sword, but there were no swords at the convent. Even the knives for dinner were so blunt that they would barely be able to scrape butter from the pat.

Mal had taught her how to wield a sword.

Days passed. Evie kept her eyes peeled, waiting for her chance of escape, but she could see none. Her scalp itched where her hair had been cut short, cut while she screamed and tried to pull away and only succeeded in feeling the cut of the blade into her skin.

They had said that it was to take away her vanity. What she had missed most was the way that her hair had felt when Mal’s fingers ran through it.

Finally, her eyes came to settle on the candle at her bedside. That, they could not deprive her of, not if they expected her to rise for _Matins Laud_.

In Mal’s hand, her blade had flashed in the sun like a flicker of a flame.

Instead, Evie decided, she would use a flame as a blade.

 

 

_Their first kiss was uncertain. The second was feverish. Mal’s fingers touched her face like tracing an epiphany, and Evie knew that she had crossed more lines than she had ever known existed._

_Mal was worth it._

_She fell, and it was like flying, as if Mal has some great wings to carry them both through the sky beneath the burning sun._

_Mal was a fire, and Evie walked willingly into the flames._

_Then Grimhilde found out._

_And set about tearing Evie’s world down._

 

 

There wasn’t even that much to burn, in the convent, but Evie found things all the same. She set the fire to make sure that her room would be destroyed, hoping that the falling rocks and the flames would make it impossible to know if she had ever been in there at all.

Being believed dead was better than being dead, and perhaps it could give her just as much freedom.

She set the fire, covered her mouth against the smoke, and ran.

 

 

_“Whatever happens,” Mal whispered, her eyes boring into Evie’s and the green seeming to shine with fervour. “I will find you again.”_

_Evie’s windows had been barred closed, and she knew she had only minutes before she was taken away. She clung to Mal’s fingers through the bars. “I know. We’ll find each other again.”_

_“I will burn down their world to find you,” said Mal, and made it a promise and a threat and a plea all at once._

 

 

Perhaps that was part of what had inspired her.

She made sure to steal needles and thread, shoes that she could truly walk in, and water to wash the taste of soot from her tongue. On her way through the back entrances she rang the bell that was meant to wake the sisters, woke them before the fire spread too far.

This was for her escape. If the Abbess or others who had tried to chain her died, then so be it, but she would rather not have innocents on her conscience.

Perhaps there were others who would escape as well.

She knew of an abandoned house not far from the convent, close enough that she would be able to walk there by sunrise. But the road was dark, clouds hiding the moon, and she stumbled on the road and cursed and pushed on again.

The beat of a horse’s hooves sounded behind her, and her heart leapt into her throat. She hunched her shoulders and bowed her head, hoping that in the dark and without her apron her garb would be inconspicuous enough for the rider to pass her by.

In her right hand, she clutched the longest of the needles that she had taken from the convent. It might be small, but as Mal had once told her, hand lingering on Evie’s as she showed her how to move the blade, the tip of every blade was small. And it was the tip that mattered.

The horse drew round in front of her, and she steeled herself, ready to lash out against the dark figure in men’s garb. But then they pushed back their hood, and tears of relief welled in Evie’s eyes as Mal stood before her.

“Evie?”

Evie did not even bother with words for a reply. She simply kissed her, desperate and sure, still tasting flames and hunger on her tongue. When she drew back, she realised that tears were trickling down her face, but Mal was looking at her like a miracle and that was all that mattered.

Mal laughed, shaking and the most unsure that Evie had ever heard her sound or seen her look. “We were coming for you,” she said. “Me and Jay and Carlos… we were coming to rescue you. And you rescued yourself.”

There were more hoofbeats on the path behind them, and Evie spun, but relaxed as she recognised Mal’s acquaintances – and at times accomplices.

“You still found me,” said Evie. Her voice croaked, she could feel soot on her hands and scabs beneath the short growth of her hair. But Mal still looked at her like she was beautiful. And, more than she ever had in the gowns and jewels her mother had forced her into, she felt it.

“Come on,” said Mal. “I have clothes for you, and papers.”

“You have a plan?”

Mal smiled. “Of course I have a plan.”

She should have expected nothing else, of course. Evie stole one more kiss from her lips, then accepted her help into the saddle.

They turned to the east, and rode, and the sun crept over the horizon before them. And Mal slipped her arm around Evie’s waist, and for all that the world could try, Evie knew that it would never best them.


End file.
